"Either a society is racist or it is not"/ "Ou a sociedade é racista ou não é racista"

“Either a society is racist or it is not” – Frantz Fanon

Since about the year 2000, I have comparatively analyzed racial politics in America and Brazil. I have also read and participated in online forums and discussion communities where people share their opinions on various topics. The opinions that I have developed over the years represent a combination of influences from everyday people to well-known college professors. Some of my postings on this blog are meant to be read as separate pieces of a common theme while others are works that will be continued over the course of several days or months.

To start this essay, I would like to respond to a few of the e-mails and postings that have piqued my interest or demanded a response. One reader from Argentina posted a response (entitled “A response to Mr. Mark Wells”) to one of my past essays in the forum column in December of 2004. I will briefly cite a few of his arguments (in italics) and then offer my responses.

“although there is racism and stereotypes of the blacks as lazy or criminals, there is undoubtedly less racism in Brazil or Latin America in its totality than in the U.S., and yourself know why: there never in Latin America, as far as I remind, something like the Ku Klux Klan, nor Skinhead neo-nazis. There are not here mass beatings of blacks as there were in the U.S. time ago.”

This is a common opinion that I find posted all over Brazilian-based internet and magazine “letters to the editor” columns as well as right here in the BRAZZIL forum column. Brazilians, as well as non-Brazilians often point to America’s violent racist past to justify the belief that Brazil is a more harmonious society. First of all, no one can deny the violence of past and present American society, but my comparisons are based on Brazil and America of the present with intent of further analysis and interpretation of the facts from a Brazilian historical context. I would argue two things.

While (acknowledged) racial violence and mass Civil Rights movements existed in the US and on a (seemingly) smaller scale in Brazil, I would argue that people of African descent in the United States and Brazil today in many ways still occupy the same positions in their respective countries. I say acknowledged because while no one can deny that racist violence is a part of American history, there seems to be a denial of its very existence in the history of Brazil. Brazilian historians have written extensively about racial violence in Brazil but Brazilians continue to believe that slavery and the post-abolition lives of Brazilians of African descent were much better than in the US. Donna Goldstein points out that while Brazilian social scientists have written extensively about racial imbalances in Brazilian homicide rates, “they have been extremely cautious about proposing race as a determining or causal factor”[1] using the example of an essay by Luis Eduardo Soares, Cláudia Milito and Hélio R.S. Silva entitled “Homicídios Dolosos Praticados Contra Crianças e Adolescentes no Estado do Rio de Janeiro-1991 a Julho de 1993.” Anthropologists such Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães have in fact highlighted the fact that racial violence is not as rare as one might think in Brazil[2].

The point that I am making is that Americans have been far more exposed to issues dealing with race and racism because the elites, leaders and forefathers of this country didn’t attempt to hide their racist ideals. In Brazil, on the contrary, everything was done to hide racist tendencies and policies even when the state actively supported them. Actual video and photos of lynchings, murders, police brutality and such has left an indelible imprint in the American psyche for at least the last half century. If a photo is worth a thousand words, imagine how these images have affected the minds of not only American citizens, but also people beyond North American shores. The question of race has never been hidden in American society. On the other hand, let us ask ourselves: if everytime a Rede Globo news program reported the murder of six kids in a morro in Rio and the word raça (race) was never mentioned, how would people interpret this data? Is it possible that people would imagine that these people were killed because they were possible thieves, drug dealers or just poor? Anything beyond the fact that they were non-white? Some people, while understanding that favelas are overwhelmingly non-white, will also revert to the argument that white people also live in the favelas. There are a few problems with these arguments.